Out to Lunch Read Free Page A

really hot.
    Where was she?
    She slowly opened her eyes and looked nervously toward the mirror. It was time to find out just who she’d changed into.
    But as Katie’s eyelids fluttered open, she discovered there was no mirror in front of her. There was no sink, either. Katie wasn’t even in the bathroom. She was in the cafeteria! She’d just burned her hand on the hot lunch counter.
    A really bad smell began to waft up from the table.
    “Yuck! What stinks?” Katie said aloud.
    She looked down at a stack of disgusting gray hamburgers. Beside the burgers was a pile of old slices of American cheese. One of the slices was covered in green mold. Spoiled cheese and bad hamburgers—Katie felt sick.
    Beads of sweat began to form on her forehead. Katie raised her hand to wipe them away. That’s when she saw that her hands were much larger than usual—the size of adult hands. She was also wearing clear plastic gloves that made her big hands feel hot and sweaty.
    Katie ran her gloved hands over her dress. The dress was mostly white, but there were brown gravy stains all over it. Some of the stains looked like they’d been there for a while. Others looked as though they’d just landed on the dress today.
    As Katie reached up to wipe a bead of sweat from her cheek, she felt a sharp pain in her lower back—the kind her mother complained about when she’d spent too many hours standing up at work. Katie’s feet really hurt, too. As she looked down, she was amazed to see just how huge her feet had become. Her white shoes looked like big boats on the ends of her legs!
    “Excuse me,” a fourth-grade boy said to Katie. “Can I have a hot dog and a carton of milk?”
    That’s when Katie realized what had happened to her.
    Katie Carew had turned into Lucille the lunch lady!

Chapter 4
    Now what? Katie thought nervously. I can’t do this. I don’t want to touch that disgusting meat.
    “What’s going on up there?” a sixth-grade girl shouted from the back of the line.
    “The lunch lady is so slow,” someone else said.
    Katie felt like crying. She wasn’t used to having kids yell at her. She didn’t think being Lucille would be very much fun, but there was nothing she could do about it now.
    Katie’s only hope was that she had only been stuck inside Speedy’s body for a little while. Maybe that’s how it would work with
    Lucille’s body, too. Maybe the magic wind would change Katie back into herself pretty soon. She sure hoped so.
    “Come on! Move it!” a sixth-grader shouted.
    The kids were getting really mad. Katie wished she could just run away and hide, but there was nowhere for her to go. Katie had no choice. She was Lucille. She had to do what Lucille would do.
    She had to serve disgusting food to kids.
    “Oh man, not hot dogs again,” a fifth-grade boy named Carlos moaned as he stared at a bucket of hot dogs swimming around in boiling water. “We had those yesterday, and three days before that.”
    “I know how you feel,” Katie agreed. “I’m pretty sick of these hounds with Mississippi mud myself. Would you rather have a wimpy instead?”
    Hounds with Mississippi mud? Wimpy? Katie was shocked as the weird words left her mouth. She’d never even heard those words before. But somehow she just seemed to know that a hound with Mississippi mud was a hot dog with mustard, and that a wimpy was a hamburger.
    It must be some sort of lunchroom code that only lunch ladies know, Katie thought to herself.
    “Who are you calling wimpy?” Carlos demanded in an angry voice.
    Katie blushed. “Nobody. Wimpy means hamburger.”
    “Huh?” Carlos asked her.
    “Oh, never mind.” Katie replied in her best lunch lady voice. “Just move along.”
    A sixth-grade boy named Malcolm was next in line. “What’s the sandwich today?” he asked her.
    “Hen fruit,” Katie answered. Oops! There was that lunchroom lingo again. “Uh, I mean egg salad,” she explained quickly.
    “Blech!” Malcolm exclaimed. “I hate egg